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Fat Tuesday: The Surprising Shortcut to Better Health
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/the-surprising-shortcut-to-better-health/
he Surprising Shortcut to Better Health
By TARA PARKER-POPEFor more than a decade, Gretchen Reynolds has been writing about the science of health and fitness. Her weekly column, Phys Ed, is one of this paper?s most popular features, regularly appearing on top of the ?Most E-mailed? list. Now Ms. Reynolds has distilled the knowledge gained from years of fitness reporting into a new book, ?The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer,?? published last month.
Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.
While the subtitle alone makes bold promises about the potential of exercise to protect the human body, the most surprising message from Ms. Reynolds is not that we all need to exercise more ? or at least not the way exercise is typically defined by the American public. Ms. Reynolds makes a clear distinction between the amount of exercise we do to improve sports performance and the amount of exercise that leads to better health. To achieve the latter, she explains, we don?t need to run marathons, sweat it out on exercise bikes or measure our peak oxygen uptake. We just need to do something.
?Humans,? she writes, ?are born to stroll.?
I recently spoke with Ms. Reynolds about the science of exercise, why standing up is good for you and why, after writing a book about fitness, she began to exercise less. Here?s our conversation.
Why did you choose ?The First 20 Minutes? for the title of a fitness book?
The first 20 minutes of moving around, if someone has been really sedentary, provide most of the health benefits. You get prolonged life, reduced disease risk ? all of those things come in in the first 20 minutes of being active.
Without being evangelical, I wanted people to understand that this is a book about how little exercise you can do in order to get lots and lots of health benefits. Two-thirds of Americans get no exercise at all. If one of those people gets up and moves around for 20 minutes, they are going to get a huge number of health benefits, and everything beyond that 20 minutes is, to some degree, gravy.
That doesn?t mean I?m suggesting people should not exercise more if they want to. You can always do more. But the science shows that if you just do anything, even stand in place 20 minutes, you will be healthier.
Is part of the problem that people equate exercise with trying to lose weight, and many of them have given up?
I think a lot of people look to exercise to help them lose weight, and when they don?t lose weight immediately with exercise, they quit. They return to the couch, and they basically never move again. What is lost in that is that fitness is almost certainly more important than fatness.
If you are overweight but fit, meaning you have a reasonably good V012 max (a measure of oxygen uptake), then your risk of premature death, all the chronic diseases ? diabetes, heart disease, cancer ? will drop. If you have to choose, choose to be fit, whether you lose weight or not.
If someone starts an exercise program and improves his fitness, even if he doesn?t lose an ounce, he will generally have a longer life and a much healthier life. It would be nice if people would look at exercise as a way to make themselves feel better and live longer and not necessarily as a way to make themselves skinnier.
In researching this book, what did you find are the biggest misconceptions about exercise?
One of the biggest misconceptions is that exercise has to be hard, that exercise means marathon running or riding your bike for three hours or doing something really strenuous. That?s untrue and, I think, discourages a lot of people from exercising. If you walk, your body registers that as motion, and you get all sorts of physiological changes that result in better health. Gardening counts as exercise. What would be nice would be for people to identify with the whole idea of moving more as opposed to quote ?exercise.?
A regular theme of your column is the risks of being sedentary. What?s more important to health: exercise or sedentary behavior?
It?s also an important theme in the book. There are two things going on: One is activity, and the other is inactivity, and they have different effects on the body. There is a whole scientific discipline called inactivity physiology that looks at what happens if you just sit still for hours at a time. If the big muscles in your legs don?t contract for hours on end, then you get physiological changes in your body that exercise won?t necessarily undo. Exercise causes one set of changes in your body, and being completely sedentary causes another.
What?s your approach to better fitness? Join in the discussion below.
Has writing this book changed your own approach to fitness?
It validated some of the things I was already doing, like not stretching before a workout, which I always hated doing. I hated sit-ups and found out they were bad for your back. I was pleased to learn that. It has changed how I approach hydration in exercise. Now I drink when I?m thirsty, and it seems to be completely fine.
I also exercise a whole lot less. Partly it?s because I have less time, but it?s also because I have learned that I don?t have to do more to be healthy. My main goal now is not to be competitive. What I really want is to be healthy and to set a good example for my son. I want to be around for the next 40 years, and the science seems to show very clearly that you don?t have to do a lot to make yourself a whole lot healthier.
I run a couple of miles most days. I used to feel like if I didn?t run five miles it didn?t count. Now I?m very content to get out for half an hour or 20 minutes, and I feel reasonably healthy after that.
And you told me that you also stand more?
I really do stand up at least every 20 minutes now, because I was spending five or six hours unmoving in my chair. The science is really clear that that is very unhealthy, and that it promotes all sorts of disease. All you have to do to ameliorate that is to stand up. You don?t even have to move. I?m standing up right now as I talk on the phone. I stand during most of my interviews now.
I?m finding this very inspirational. What is your advice for people reading this ? what should they go do today?
If people want to be healthier and prolong their life span, all they really need to do is go for a walk. It?s the single easiest thing anyone can do. There are some people who honestly can?t walk, so I would say to those people to try to go to the local Y.M.C.A. and swim.
There are always options for moving. You don?t have to do anything that hurts. You don?t have to buy equipment. If you have a pair of shoes, they don?t even have to be sneakers. People have gotten the idea that exercise has to be complicated, and that they need a heart rate monitor, and a coach, and equipment and special instruction. They don?t.
The human body is a really excellent coach. If you listen to it, it will tell you if you?re going hard enough, if you?re going too hard. If it starts to hurt, then you back off. It should just feel good, because we really are built to move, and not moving is so unnatural. Just move, because it really can be so easy, and it really can change your life.
I know this is just a Q&A pushing a book, but I thought some of what she says was pretty interesting. What say you PCE? This in particular really spoke to me, and is kind of reflective to how I'm trying to shape my attitude toward working out and losing weight:
If someone starts an exercise program and improves his fitness, even if he doesn?t lose an ounce, he will generally have a longer life and a much healthier life. It would be nice if people would look at exercise as a way to make themselves feel better and live longer and not necessarily as a way to make themselves skinnier.
Re: Fat Tuesday: The Surprising Shortcut to Better Health
So to sum up this article, get off your azz and stroll?
Thank you for the Sky is Blue News of the day.
LOL true.
I had to separate exercise and losing weight in my mind before I really began to enjoy it. When I exercise to lose weight, I'm frustrated, disappointed, bored, tortured by my workouts. When I exercise because I enjoy the activity I'm doing, I want to be healthy, stay young and vital, and it helps manage my arthritis and sciatic pain, I enjoy it and am loathe to miss a workout.
I think that, for most people, tiny, tiny steps (like a 20 minute walk after dinner) are the way to get started. It really doesn't matter if your exercise is all at once or spread throughout the day, so I started by exercising 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening. Over the course of a few years, I'm up to an hour of pretty high-intensity exercise 6 days/week, and am looking to add more. It'd be nice if I lost some weight, but that happens through diet for me, not necessarily through exercise. I really love seeing my body change, feeling myself getting stronger, and being able to do things that I wouldn't have dreamed of just a few years ago. That's what really keeps me going with exercise.
I totally get this. I have never had to really exercise for weight loss. I exercise for the long term health benefits. I know my family has a history of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. So, it doesn't torture me to get out and exercise.
Give me my iPod loaded with some kick azz songs, and I'm off for at least a good 40 minute run/walk routine. Now what I don't like is the 40 minute long strength training videos. For me, it needs to be a 15-20 minute video because I will more readily do that over a long azz routine.
Which reminds me, I have to sign back up for the 5K training program. *makes mental note to register* I love it!
This is a real no brainier. And good advice. The problem is that the 300 pound man will read this and think if he walks around the block he will lose 125 pounds.
The issue is in calling it a shortcut.
Oh I definitely agree about the shortcut thing. And that is really the crux - it really should be a no brainer but because there is such a disconnect in this country between fitness and weight-loss it's really easy to lose sight of what could be a really simple approach to getting healthier. Because no, the 300lb man or woman won't lose 150 pounds just by strolling for 20 minutes but incremental changes can lead to more changes which could all add up to better health, including losing weight.
And this is why I had to separate the two (exercise and losing weight) in my head. A walk around the block is a good place to start, it's better than nothing, and certainly offers health benefits, but it's probably not going to make a big dent in your weight loss goals. There is simply no short-cut to fitness, and most of us greatly underestimate the amount of physical activity required to truly be fit.
Agree. The thing is, all these things take time, and a complete change in lifestyle. And what everyone wants is a quick fix so they can go back to their couch surfing and diet cokes. The culture of food and movement is so completely effed in this country, and until that fundamentally changes, people will not succeed in becoming an staying healthy.
I don't think this advice is really for the 300 pound man, though. It's for the average American who is 10-20 pounds overweight, who doesn't exercise because they can't (and don't want to) spend an hour in the gym every day and besides, it doesn't really help them lose weight anyway. The message is, even if you don't lose weight, even if you aren't running marathons, you can still get big health benefits just by moving around more and standing up every 15 minutes at work (not even leaving your office, just standing up).
Yes. But calling it a shortcut doesn't reflect this.